Members of Mexico City’s much-maligned “informal economy”—key to Mexico’s political stability—depend on these organizations to represent them and intermediate with city authorities in order get permissions for selling merchandise on the street or occupying land for housing

Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographic cover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’. Thus Locher matters. Science’s history matters. Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.

The fact is the world is moving in the direction of being dependent on a relatively few number of container lines to carry an estimated 60 percent of the goods by value moved internationally by sea each year, according to the World Shipping Council. Some believe that once the current shakeout, which this year has already seen three major container lines get merged, acquired or knocked out is over, there will be six to 10 major carriers left.

As an architecture office that’s focused on building, any project that doesn’t get continued all the way to the end is regarded as an aborted effort or failure. Those efforts can be highly productive in generating a particular type of knowledge that you can only get by doing a project. Yet if you don’t autonomize that knowledge, you can never capitalize on it. So AMO started because we wanted to find a way to, first of all, autonomize that knowledge, and see whether that knowledge could see the light of day in a form other than a building. To give the intellectual dimension of the office an economic dimension was a very important consideration. Way back, we had this Stichting Groszstadt in the Netherlands, which was a non-profit foundation that deliberately cultivated an intellectual dimension of architecture almost exclusively through public sector funding. These subsidies dried up throughout the 1990s and onto the 2000s in the context of the market economy. So we knew we would have to fend for ourselves, that we would have to properly market our knowledge as an economic entity in order to continuously fund that dimension of the office. Each project became a kind of continuous fundraising project for itself. Secondly, a lot of clients came to us, particularly at the turn of the millennium, with questions rather than briefs for a building. Even when they did come with a brief for a building, it was not necessarily the building that was an answer to their problems.

“Can contemporary architectural research learn anything from the military principle of incitatory operations?” asked Eyal Weizman in Volume #16: Engineering Society. Today, almost a decade later, with military operations taking place in the five continents and radical groups increasingly gaining power, Weizman’s inquiry still feels relevant. What can architects and urbanists ‘learn’ from the current sociomilitary scenarios across the globe? Can they be a source of knowledge to provoke the city, disarm it, and in doing so reveal its systems and secrets?

She imbues wood with living properties and turns it to a flexible fabric with unpredictable movements, changing its color and texture. It’s an astonishing use of this traditional material to create new forms and experiences.